Government Of All But Talents #ombh

Mandrake has cheering news for the nation: Martin Amis is to campaign for the laws on assisted suicide to be reformed.

The author, who caused an outcry last year when he called for euthanasia booths to be installed on every street corner, says that he now regards euthanasia as nothing less than “an evolutionary inevitability”.

Amis says: “We are living too long. It’s not viable. I can’t think of any reason to stay alive once the mind goes. It is an existential nightmare that you can’t get out of life. Medical science got us into this and medical science will have to get us out.”

Amis, who has been given a platform for his views by Channel 4 in a polemical programme, believes that public opinion is on his side. “Of course, there are legal difficulties, but people are ahead of the Government on this. It is a residue of Christian feeling – this idea of the sanctity of life – that is holding things back, but we have to get rid of this primitive feeling.”

Re euthanasia: when I was younger, I used to think it should be freely available. I still feel sympathy for the concept when someone has a terminal disease and they are going to die in great pain, or when someone has a disease where their mind is going to lose its faculties and doesn’t want to get to that point. But…if we are going to have such a thing, I think it should be very hard to get, not easy.

The risks of abuse are just so high. An unscrupulous person kills off a burdensome relative. Someone who’s not really medically ill kills themselves. I can just think of all kinds of problems.

What if insurance companies refused to fund someone with a terminal disease who wanted to keep living, tacitly pushing them towards euthanasia? My parents had a friend who died of cancer last year. Things got very uncomfortable at the end but he wanted every day that he could get, just so he’d see his family as much as possible before he died, which is perfectly fair enough.

I actually think Amis is right, and that the law of diminishing returns has reared its ugly head when it comes to prolonging life. It’s a monstrous ‘trolley problem’ that no-one seems willing to confront honestly.

Back in the dark ages when I was studying med, the figures for the bulk of spending on health over the lifetime ran something like 80% or 90% of the expenditure by government was in the last couple of years of life, on average. (Shift the spending to earlier in life, and you’d get better area under the curve for quality-of-life over time in both absolute and per-dollar curves)

Yes, devil in detail, but it’s also worth considering a relatively healthy old fart with nothing interesting to them, simply tired of life, retiring after a good innings before any illness intervenes.

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